As I was reading through “Cookbooks as Historical Sources” many ideas were bouncing around in my head in relation to my own experiences in restaurants. Before moving to Vancouver, I worked at an Italian restaurant run by Greeks. I had never really thought much of the menu as I had it all memorized and could recite it like a robot. The menu itself lost meaning to me once I started working at the restaurant.
After reading the article, I took a second to reflect on the value of the menu. I realized how much about the restaurant a diner could learn from looking at the menu. Many of the dishes on the menu were written in Greek and many of the dishes also included ingredients you wouldn’t see in Italian food (or what I think of as Italian food) like gyro meat. The restaurant itself is not advertised as a Greek-Italian fusion, but if you look at the menu it makes it apparent that the restaurant is run by Greeks.
Not only did the article making me take a second to reflect on my own experiences with menus, what also caught my attention was the idea of examining ethnicity and class within menus.
The two ideas certainly intersect in the restaurant industry both on and off the menu.
I don’t go out to eat very often and neither does my family. But growing up I remember a lot of my friends’ families (who were wealthier) taking me out to eat with them. We would go to these “boujee” restaurants as if it was a casual outing.
I remember how stressed I would become when looking at the menu and realizing that every dish on it was foreign to me, or the language used were words I had never heard. I remember looking around the table and everyone else was chatting and nodding in regards to the food, I felt very left out. It felt like a secret elite club meeting and I was simply a visitor.
Menus and restaurants can easily exclude people. Even though segregated restaurants are now deemed to be non-existent, there are other factors that prevent EVERYONE from attending a restaurant. The culture a restaurant creates can be appealing to others while unappealing to the rest. Whether it be price, cuisine, location and staff, all these factors contribute into what population of people dine at a certain restaurant. The people who dine at a restaurant also contribute to the creation of the restaurant’s culture. This puts a limit on the extent that people can grow their food vocabulary and mingle with people of other cultures and classes.
I appreciate these reflections on inclusion, Sofia. Your observation that exclusion can occur on many levels — linguistic, cultural, economic, environment — is an important consideration. When preparing for that class discussion, I found some menus that made intriguing gestures at inclusion and pedagogy. As a few examples, one had a pronunciation guide for foreign words, another had little history and cultural lessons in side columns of the menu, and another had a QR code that would take customers to a website that contained information about the cultural background of the restaurant. I’ve also seen photos with informative captions, and, outside of one French restaurant in NYC, there was a sign that warned that servers were rude, but that it was part of the cultural experience. There are clearly creative and fun ways to foment inclusion… it makes the decision not to even more infuriating.